What’s happening in Wisconsin is not complicated. At the beginning of this year, the state was on course to end 2011 with a budget surplus of $120 million. As Ezra Klein explained, newly elected GOP Governor Scott Walker then ” signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). The new legislation was not offset, and it turned a surplus into a deficit.”

Walker then used the deficit he’d created as the justification for assaulting his state’s public employees. He used a law cooked up by a right-wing advocacy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC likes to fly beneath the radar, but I described the organization in a 2005 article as “the connective tissue that links state legislators with right-wing think tanks, leading anti-tax activists and corporate money.” Similar laws are on the table in Ohio and Indiana.

Piggish fake anti-socialism rants continue to spew from the bilious mouth of Rush Limbaugh, whose politics and priorities are deeply convoluted. In the latest example of his willful disdain for facts and history, he seriously went on an anti-union rant that trivializes the concerns of the thousands of janitors, firefighters and schoolteachers that are protesting in Wisconsin today. Naturally, he’s doing so because it’s convenient — perhaps he’s forgotten his rant less than a year ago calling for a coal miner’s union. Sigh.